| Rick Santorum  AKA Richard John Santorum
Born: 10-May-1958
Birthplace: Winchester, VA
Gender: Male
Religion: Roman Catholic
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Politician
Party Affiliation: Republican Nationality: United States
Executive summary: US Senator from Pennsylvania, 1995-2007 In his short career as a lawyer before going into politics, Rick Santorum's most notable client was the World Wrestling Entertainment, then called the World Wrestling Federation. He worked to shield WWE from federal regulations on the use of steroids, arguing that since wrestling was not a sport the rules should not apply. Santorum ran for Congress in 1990, four years after getting his law degree, running ads criticizing the incumbent for representing Pennsylvania while owning a house in Virginia and living there most of the year. By law, of course, legislators must live in the location they represent, but Virginia is within easy driving distance of Washington DC while Pennsylvania is two hours further north on the highway. Santorum won the election, and held his seat in the House for two terms before being elected to the Senate in 1994.
In two terms in the Senate, he became best known for his stalwart stand against gay rights and, more broadly, gayness in general, although Santorum prefers the words 'homosexual' or 'sodomites'. In a 2003 interview he likened sodomy to adultery, polygamy, and incest as "antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family". He has compared the idea of homosexual marriage to "man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be," and said, "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [gay] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." Deeply concerned about sexual acts between consenting adults, Santorum has argued that the government can regulate private consensual sexual acts, and he has specifically complained that the 1966 Supreme Court decision in Griswold v Connecticut, which established Americans' right to privacy, was wrong. The Griswold case was not about gay rights, but overturned state laws prohibiting the use of contraceptives.
In a 2002 article about the controversy over Catholic priests molesting young children, Santorum wrote, "It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning 'private' moral matters such as alternative lifestyles." In Washington, he led a weekly devotions session for other Catholics in Congress, but Democrats were not allowed to attend. In 2001, he tried to attach an amendment to Bush's No Child Left Behind Act that would have mandated that public schools teach "intelligent design" alongside evolution.
Santorum always opposed abortion, although he prefered to use the word 'infanticide', and his arguments seemed to be very deeply felt. When his wife miscarried in 1996, they named the dead fetus Gabriel after the Biblical archangel, and brought its lifeless body to his family. Their children, including three kids under seven, spent several hours cuddling and kissing Gabriel, singing lullabies in his ear, because Santorum wanted them to "absorb and understand that they had a brother." Santorum's wife wrote a book of Letters to Gabriel, a collection of prayers and anti-abortion arguments, including a stirring call for Gabriel's support of anti-abortion legislation, and Santorum has read from the book in debate on the Senate floor.
In 2005, Santorum proposed legislation that would have blocked the National Weather Service from providing information about weather to the general public. His intent was apparently to help AccuWeather, a Pennsylvania firm, drive viewers to their web pages and away from the Weather Service's site. The legislation did not pass, but later that year when New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, Santorum said that the National Weather Service had given "no warning, or not sufficient warning in my opinion" about the storm's path. In reality, the Weather Service issued loud and accurate warnings days in advance about what was to come from Katrina.
Santorum once said that "the ultimate homeland security issue" is making sure sodomites and homosexuals cannot marry each other. As communist North Korea announced its nuclear weapons program, Santorum said that Iran was a bigger nuclear threat, because Korean dictator Kim Jong Il "doesn't want to die; he wants to watch NBA basketball". Santorum used the auspices of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to explain the Iraq war: "As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else. It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States." Numerous times, Santorum claimed that Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, alluding to small quantities of decades-old chemical weapons found during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and announced then with little fanfare. After a Defense Department spokesman flatly told Fox News that these vastly degraded weapons, left over from Iraq's 1980s war against Iran, were "not the WMDs for which this country went to war", Santorum replied that he would "wait and see what the actual Defense Department formally says".
Along with Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, and Grover Norquist, Santorum was at the center of the Republicans' tactic of pressuring lobbying firms to hire only Republicans. At regularly scheduled once-weekly meetings held since Republicans took Congress and in 1994, Santorum and other leading Republicans were provided with a list of job openings at lobbying companies, and literally told the lobbyists who to hire -- always well-connected Republicans. It was called the "K Street Project" because most lobbying firms have offices on Washington's K Street, but the system backfired when the lobbyists' "freeze-out" of Democrats became so successful that all the legislators on the take from crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff were Republicans. When the arrangement was first reported in 2006, Santorum denied it was true and claimed to not even know Abramoff. When it was proven that Abramoff had been involved, Santorum announced that the "K Street" meetings had been ended. Months later it was reported that the meetings between lobbyists and Republicans were still being held at the same time, place, and day, once weekly. In 2006, the non-partisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington named Santorum one of the twenty most corrupt US legislators.
He lost his Senate seat in 2006 (in a landslide to Bob Casey, Jr., losing 41% to 59%), and in an ironic finale to his public career, a major issue in the campaign was that Santorum was living in a house he owned in Virginia -- not in Pennsylvania. Further, he had taken a second mortgage on his Virginia home from a private bank that serves only "affluent investors and institutions", a bank which requires that borrowers have assets far in excess of anything Santorum reported in his public financial disclosure reports. Father: (psychologist)
Mother: (nurse)
Sister: (older)
Brother: Dan Santorum (younger)
Wife: Karen Garver (former nurse, m. 1990, 7 children)
Daughter: Elizabeth Anne Santorum
Son: Richard John Santorum, Jr.
Son: Daniel James Santorum
Son: Gabriel Michael Santorum (d. 11-Oct-1996, prematurely after 20 weeks in utero)
Daughter: Sarah Maria Santorum
Son: Peter Kenneth Santorum
Son: Patrick Francis Santorum
High School: Carmel High School, Mundelein, IL (1976)
University: BA Political Science, Pennsylvania State University (1980)
University: MBA, University of Pittsburgh (1981)
Law School: JD, Dickinson School of Law, Carlisle, PA (1986)
Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott LLC
US Senator, Pennsylvania (1995-2007)
US Congressman, Pennsylvania 18th (1991-95)
Pennsylvania State Official Asst. to State Sen. J. Doyle Corman (1981-86)
The Philadelphia Inquirer Columnist (2007-)
Member of the Board of Universal Health Services (2007-)
American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise Honorary Committee
America's Foundation Chairman
Ethics and Public Policy Center Senior Fellow (2007-)
Israel Project Board of Advisors
Leadership Institute Bi-Partisan Congressional Advisory Board
Pennsylvania Bar Association 1986
Rotary International
Thomas More Law Center Advisory Board
Washington Legal Foundation National Board of Advisors
College Republicans
Tau Epsilon Phi Fraternity
Time Magazine 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America
Evolution Skeptics
Eponyms santorum
Italian Ancestry Paternal
Risk Factors: Homophobia, Toupee
Official Website:
http://santorum.senate.gov/
Rotten Library Page:
Santorum
Author of books:
It Takes A Family: Conservatism And The Common Good (2005)
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